(Played on Xbox Series S for... 30-40 hours? I guess? I didn't keep track and don't feel like checking. Review posted on July 6, 2022.)
Disco Elysium has a bookstore where you can buy books to read to pass the in-game time. I picked one up because I had some in-game time to pass. It was part of a popular series of novels starring Dick Mullen, a detective. I started reading and it was clearly meant to be the most stereotypical detective story imaginable. In an act of something - mercy, cruelty, I'm not sure yet - a gust of wind tore off the last parts of the book from the poorly constructed spine. I never got to read the ending. The game was happy to remind me that it was probably predictable anyway and gave me a few options to choose for the "whodunnit" to give myself some closure. I picked one and the game basically said "sure, alright" and that was the end of it.
Disco Elysium is a detective story... or at least something resembling one. Maybe at most, actually. You play as a cop who got super drunk and woke up without knowing his history or his name or even his face. All you know is that a guy got hanged nearby and you're supposed to figure out the story. It's probably best classified as an RPG, but it walks and quacks a bit like an old school point-and-click adventure game. You assign some stat points to your guy, either manually or via one of the game's preset options (I chose "thinker", which goes all in on intellect and all out on empathy), and away you go.
Basically, you walk around in the world and talk to people. Often, you will be given choices on how to respond in conversation, both verbal and non-verbal. Sometimes the choices seem like pretty normal responses to what's being said or done to you. But usually the choices are batshit insane. This game does not want you to play a normal, competent cop. You start off as a drunken mess, and staying a drunken mess is the path of least resistance. This pairs with the game's RPG elements to make for some wild scenarios. The stats you have points in determine what choices are available to you, and sometimes how likely you are to succeed at an action you might choose. The dungeon master here is quite good at its job, and failure is often as much fun as success. The game tends to proceed either way. In fact, the wacky dialogue and situations are the real meat of this game. The murder mystery is just a backdrop to set things in motion.
One particular aspect of the game I want to applaud is the writing. The writing - and I'm talking about the wordplay and not the storytelling - is sharp and by far the game's strongest aspect. The narration is hella sassy, both for the general "dungeon master" talk that explains what you do and for the voices in your head. Each of your twenty-four RPG stats is represented as a voice in your head (thankfully all voiced by the same guy, who does a fantastic job), and the more points you put into a stat, the more often it pipes up as things happen during the game. I started off with a high Encyclopedia stat and accidentally leveled it twice more over the course of the game due to some failed IRL dexterity checks. This resulted in enough knowledge and lore about the game's world to fill a wiki or two.
Even outside the narration, dialogue is well written and every character is a joy to talk to. Even the assholes. Especially the assholes. I never thought I'd be able to say I have a favorite video game racist, but Measurehead is a piece of work. The people writing this game went HAM on this guy. Whether it's the shitty brat Cuno throwing rocks in the back yard, or the couple who came to this remote town to search for cryptids, or the group of youths trying to start a dance club in a church, there's no shortage of freaks and weirdos to have a nice chat with.
As for the overall story - you know, the murder mystery - it was decent. It had some nice tie-ins with the worldbuilding and did a great job of setting the stage for everything else going on in town. Like I said, though, this isn't the main attraction. If you're looking for a "story-based" game, you won't find it here - this game's more about the little stories you make for yourself by clicking on the funny dialogue choices.
If I have one critique of the writing, it's that it feels like it tries too hard sometimes. There's also a political aspect to a lot of the dialogue in the game, which makes sense given some aspects of the game's world (a union strike is the biggest thing going on in town). But the dialogue choices feel outright cartoonish sometimes - the game has some kind of communist-fascist-ultraliberal-moralist alignment thing going on, and it's pretty clear when dialogue choices exist to serve this dynamic. This stuff makes me feel less like I'm roleplaying an insane detective and more like I'm roleplaying a Twitter user. Or roleplaying a Twitter user who is roleplaying their take on an insane detective. This seems to be a common issue with games with alignment systems - they tend to produce options that are clearly geared toward one of the known alignments, so the points can be tallied at the end and the story can go a certain way. It always ends up feeling like an online personality quiz. I am at least grateful that they chose political alignments over something more common like law and chaos.
Yep, pretty much!
As far as gameplay gripes go, I've got a few. The game's time and progression systems aren't perfect. In-game time passes as you advance dialogue. There is no other way to pass time. Because you need to be at 21:00 or later to move to the next day, this means you are sometimes going to have to go hunting for dialogue just for the sake of moving the game forward. Luckily, if you find your lost case files, it appears that re-reading that lets you pass time pretty quickly. Just mash A and let the hours fly by. But I didn't know that for a long time and got to a point where it was seemingly increasingly unlikely that I'd be able to progress at all.
As for progression, there are "red" and "white" checks throughout the game. White checks can be retried, and red checks cannot. To retry a white check, you need to allocate a skill point to the relevant stat. Skill points are awarded every 100 experience points, and experience points are awarded for completing tasks and very sightly (+5 on occasion) for just advancing through dialogue. This system works fine for the most part. But if you're a little eager to spend your points, you might end up at a spot where you need to pass a white check to progress but don't have the skill points necessary to retry it or the open dialogue options available in the world to farm for experience points. My game almost ended here when I needed to retry a white check to advance (authority check with Titus), but had exhausted every dialogue tree I could find in the world and was 25 EXP short of the next level. Luckily, I was able to get 30 EXP for taking a drug I'd never taken, but this was almost a softlock as far as I can tell. I don't think this is the case very often, but it bit me so I'm complaining about it.
I mentioned earlier that I accidentally put points into Encyclopedia. I don't know whether the game or myself is more to blame here, but the menus felt a little clumsy to navigate. The same X button used to open the menu is used to confirm level ups instead of closing the menu. To interact with an item, you press Y, instead of the A button you use to accept stuff elsewhere. The inventory menu never seems to start your cursor in a sensible spot. The fonts are fairly small, though there is an option to increase the font size on the most important stuff. They could have done a better job with the UI is what I'm saying. I think this was a PC game before it was a console game, so maybe it's just PC gamers not knowing what makes for a good controller-based setup. I don't know.
I don't know what was written on the pages of Disco Elysium that I tore out with the choices I made throughout the game. I'm sure focusing on empathy instead of neglecting it in my stat build would have given me a lot more details on the characters and a lot less lore on the world. Maybe I'd know what the hell is up with Cuno. There are lots of other inconsequential things I'd love to see the other side of. I might revisit this game in the future, at least for a little bit to see what it feels like with a completely different stat spread.
Overall, this game was a good time. I'm a fan of witty writing and this game had no shortage of that, believe me. Anyone who is a fan of seeing words arranged in pleasing ways should give this game a look. Just be a little more reserved with your skill points than I was so you don't have to worry about softlocks.
Also, this game stick bugged me. Those of you played it probably know what I'm talking about.
Now to turn these numbers into a functional forum signature...
Disco Elysium has a bookstore where you can buy books to read to pass the in-game time. I picked one up because I had some in-game time to pass. It was part of a popular series of novels starring Dick Mullen, a detective. I started reading and it was clearly meant to be the most stereotypical detective story imaginable. In an act of something - mercy, cruelty, I'm not sure yet - a gust of wind tore off the last parts of the book from the poorly constructed spine. I never got to read the ending. The game was happy to remind me that it was probably predictable anyway and gave me a few options to choose for the "whodunnit" to give myself some closure. I picked one and the game basically said "sure, alright" and that was the end of it.
A superstar if I've ever seen one.
Disco Elysium is a detective story... or at least something resembling one. Maybe at most, actually. You play as a cop who got super drunk and woke up without knowing his history or his name or even his face. All you know is that a guy got hanged nearby and you're supposed to figure out the story. It's probably best classified as an RPG, but it walks and quacks a bit like an old school point-and-click adventure game. You assign some stat points to your guy, either manually or via one of the game's preset options (I chose "thinker", which goes all in on intellect and all out on empathy), and away you go.
Basically, you walk around in the world and talk to people. Often, you will be given choices on how to respond in conversation, both verbal and non-verbal. Sometimes the choices seem like pretty normal responses to what's being said or done to you. But usually the choices are batshit insane. This game does not want you to play a normal, competent cop. You start off as a drunken mess, and staying a drunken mess is the path of least resistance. This pairs with the game's RPG elements to make for some wild scenarios. The stats you have points in determine what choices are available to you, and sometimes how likely you are to succeed at an action you might choose. The dungeon master here is quite good at its job, and failure is often as much fun as success. The game tends to proceed either way. In fact, the wacky dialogue and situations are the real meat of this game. The murder mystery is just a backdrop to set things in motion.
This ended up working. I got into the shipping container.
One particular aspect of the game I want to applaud is the writing. The writing - and I'm talking about the wordplay and not the storytelling - is sharp and by far the game's strongest aspect. The narration is hella sassy, both for the general "dungeon master" talk that explains what you do and for the voices in your head. Each of your twenty-four RPG stats is represented as a voice in your head (thankfully all voiced by the same guy, who does a fantastic job), and the more points you put into a stat, the more often it pipes up as things happen during the game. I started off with a high Encyclopedia stat and accidentally leveled it twice more over the course of the game due to some failed IRL dexterity checks. This resulted in enough knowledge and lore about the game's world to fill a wiki or two.
Even outside the narration, dialogue is well written and every character is a joy to talk to. Even the assholes. Especially the assholes. I never thought I'd be able to say I have a favorite video game racist, but Measurehead is a piece of work. The people writing this game went HAM on this guy. Whether it's the shitty brat Cuno throwing rocks in the back yard, or the couple who came to this remote town to search for cryptids, or the group of youths trying to start a dance club in a church, there's no shortage of freaks and weirdos to have a nice chat with.
As for the overall story - you know, the murder mystery - it was decent. It had some nice tie-ins with the worldbuilding and did a great job of setting the stage for everything else going on in town. Like I said, though, this isn't the main attraction. If you're looking for a "story-based" game, you won't find it here - this game's more about the little stories you make for yourself by clicking on the funny dialogue choices.
It's time to put this knowledge to use and upload a race tier list to Youtube.
If I have one critique of the writing, it's that it feels like it tries too hard sometimes. There's also a political aspect to a lot of the dialogue in the game, which makes sense given some aspects of the game's world (a union strike is the biggest thing going on in town). But the dialogue choices feel outright cartoonish sometimes - the game has some kind of communist-fascist-ultraliberal-moralist alignment thing going on, and it's pretty clear when dialogue choices exist to serve this dynamic. This stuff makes me feel less like I'm roleplaying an insane detective and more like I'm roleplaying a Twitter user. Or roleplaying a Twitter user who is roleplaying their take on an insane detective. This seems to be a common issue with games with alignment systems - they tend to produce options that are clearly geared toward one of the known alignments, so the points can be tallied at the end and the story can go a certain way. It always ends up feeling like an online personality quiz. I am at least grateful that they chose political alignments over something more common like law and chaos.
Yep, pretty much!
As far as gameplay gripes go, I've got a few. The game's time and progression systems aren't perfect. In-game time passes as you advance dialogue. There is no other way to pass time. Because you need to be at 21:00 or later to move to the next day, this means you are sometimes going to have to go hunting for dialogue just for the sake of moving the game forward. Luckily, if you find your lost case files, it appears that re-reading that lets you pass time pretty quickly. Just mash A and let the hours fly by. But I didn't know that for a long time and got to a point where it was seemingly increasingly unlikely that I'd be able to progress at all.
As for progression, there are "red" and "white" checks throughout the game. White checks can be retried, and red checks cannot. To retry a white check, you need to allocate a skill point to the relevant stat. Skill points are awarded every 100 experience points, and experience points are awarded for completing tasks and very sightly (+5 on occasion) for just advancing through dialogue. This system works fine for the most part. But if you're a little eager to spend your points, you might end up at a spot where you need to pass a white check to progress but don't have the skill points necessary to retry it or the open dialogue options available in the world to farm for experience points. My game almost ended here when I needed to retry a white check to advance (authority check with Titus), but had exhausted every dialogue tree I could find in the world and was 25 EXP short of the next level. Luckily, I was able to get 30 EXP for taking a drug I'd never taken, but this was almost a softlock as far as I can tell. I don't think this is the case very often, but it bit me so I'm complaining about it.
I mentioned earlier that I accidentally put points into Encyclopedia. I don't know whether the game or myself is more to blame here, but the menus felt a little clumsy to navigate. The same X button used to open the menu is used to confirm level ups instead of closing the menu. To interact with an item, you press Y, instead of the A button you use to accept stuff elsewhere. The inventory menu never seems to start your cursor in a sensible spot. The fonts are fairly small, though there is an option to increase the font size on the most important stuff. They could have done a better job with the UI is what I'm saying. I think this was a PC game before it was a console game, so maybe it's just PC gamers not knowing what makes for a good controller-based setup. I don't know.
This secret task broke me out of gay baby jail. The lesson here? Do drugs!
I don't know what was written on the pages of Disco Elysium that I tore out with the choices I made throughout the game. I'm sure focusing on empathy instead of neglecting it in my stat build would have given me a lot more details on the characters and a lot less lore on the world. Maybe I'd know what the hell is up with Cuno. There are lots of other inconsequential things I'd love to see the other side of. I might revisit this game in the future, at least for a little bit to see what it feels like with a completely different stat spread.
Overall, this game was a good time. I'm a fan of witty writing and this game had no shortage of that, believe me. Anyone who is a fan of seeing words arranged in pleasing ways should give this game a look. Just be a little more reserved with your skill points than I was so you don't have to worry about softlocks.
Also, this game stick bugged me. Those of you played it probably know what I'm talking about.
Now to turn these numbers into a functional forum signature...
